This chapter explores the movement of feminism into academic life in general and the study of popular culture in particular. It explores main ways in which feminist research into popular culture entered academic life. By the mid-1970s, the study of women and popular culture across a range of disciplines often centered on questions about 'images of women'. Cultural studies have often been dominated by questions of how 'popular culture' has been defined. The ways in which the 'popular' is conceptualised shapes the ways it is studied and analysed, and, in tum, shapes different ideas about cultural politics. The chapter draws on Stuart Hall's discussion of the four different ways in which 'the popular' has been conceptualised, and explores the ways in which each conception of 'the popular' implies a different notion of feminist cultural politics.

Voluntary action results from choices made by individuals in a private capacity, without compulsion. How can governments influence those choices? The chapter reviews three broad issues. First, governments promote volunteering through the language they use about it. Different rhetorical strategies feature, at different times and with different emphases. The spirit of service is invoked, but it is malleable: voluntarism takes on the meanings that those invoking it want it to possess. A growing recent feature of political discourse has been the ways in which volunteering has been advocated as a policy panacea by non-state actors. There follows a discussion of some key themes of volunteering-related policy initiatives. These relate to the setting of targets; the changing focus of policies to provide volunteering opportunities for young people, efforts to encourage and extend generalised norms of pro-social behaviour and efforts to mobilise volunteers in support of wider policy initiatives. The third section considers wider ways of framing policy so that support for volunteering is not a narrowly instrumental matter but instead is embedded in a wider framework of social and economic policy. This might provide the economic security that would enable individuals to engage and the social infrastructures that would provide opportunities to do so.

There has been a growing focus on the potential to use volunteering as an intervention that might deliver health benefits for relatively modest cost. There is a widely held view that a latent benefit of volunteering can be improvements in health and well-being. Consequently, there is growing interest in the opportunities that volunteering might contribute to the reduction of health inequalities. However, there are also challenges in demonstrating the health benefits of volunteering. What might cause volunteering to improve the health of those who participate in it, can we be confident that someone volunteering for the first time would benefit from doing so and how widespread might the benefits be? Before considering the evidence for volunteering’s health benefits, then, the first question considered here is what is distinctive about the mechanisms through which volunteering could affect health and what is the nature of the causal mechanisms involved? There are also analytical challenges – especially problems of selection bias and reverse causality – which limit our ability to show conclusively that volunteering has health benefits. Following these general discussions, most of the chapter considers the existing evidence in relation to three issues: psychological well-being and life satisfaction; mental health; and physical health and mortality. These are illustrated with specific examples of studies from the UK. The chapter concludes with consideration of the growing policy focus on ‘social prescribing’, and whether this might be a route through which the benefits of voluntary participation are developed, with a view to improving population health.

Concerns are regularly expressed in the UK about inequalities in and the decline of political participation. Volunteering has featured in policy proposals to promote generalised social trust (itself strongly associated with engagement in political affairs) by facilitating face-to-face contact and discussion of social issues with various dissimilar others. If efforts to raise the proportion of citizens engaged in volunteering are successful, there should be a payoff in the form of increased engagement in the formal political sphere. The assumption is that voluntary action provides a grounding in citizenship and that this will have positive spillover effects into the wider civic sphere. This chapter reviews the evidence for these arguments in the UK. It provides an overview of what the wider literature says about whether participation in voluntary action enhances the likelihood of engagement in politics and formal acts of participation such as voting, and discusses the challenges associated with measuring relevant constructs and developing appropriate analyses. The focus then switches to summarising results from academic analyses of longitudinal surveys in the UK. These i the relationship between volunteering in early adulthood and political and civic behaviours some decades later, including the influence of volunteering on outcomes such as political interest, political action and support for political parties. In addition, there are emerging evaluations of initiatives such as National Citizen Service for young people. The findings do not show strong evidence that volunteering promotes engagement in politics and the chapter concludes with reflections on why this is so.

Arriving at valid and reliable estimates of volunteer effort is important; prominent academics and stakeholders argue that in the absence of such estimates, the promotion and management of volunteering is hampered. As well as the direct benefits and economic value of volunteering, there are arguments that a strong tradition of engagement in voluntary action has latent benefits for societies, through the production of social capital – the networks, norms and trust that facilitate collective action and social cohesion. Measuring trends in voluntary action therefore forms an important part of an effort to capture its wider benefits. What do the data tell us? This chapter reviews evidence from four key sources which sheds light on different aspects of the anatomy of voluntary action in the UK. First, it considers survey data on volunteering – principally cross-sectional surveys of formal and informal volunteering by individuals. It then places these findings in an international context by examining country-level variations and some of the underlying reasons for them. This is followed by economic estimates of the scale of volunteer work, drawing principally on surveys of time use by individuals. Finally, there are data on the settings in which voluntary action takes place: to what extent is volunteering occurring only or principally in voluntary organisations, and to what extent are these organisations (and the wider voluntary sector, of which they are a part) to be considered as ‘voluntary’?

Voluntary action is not a simple concept with a universally shared definition. Social scientists distinguish between volunteering as unpaid help or unpaid work and between formal and informal volunteering. This chapter commences with a discussion of what people think volunteering is, by summarising the results of studies in which scenarios are presented to individuals about whether particular sorts of activities are considered to constitute volunteering. Then we consider the diversity of ways in which volunteering is measured in national social surveys. There follows a discussion of what are commonly referred to as key ‘paradigms’ in the interpretation of volunteering and a consideration of perspectives which have sought to explain patterns of volunteering, drawing on what are known as ‘resource’ and ‘dominant status’ models and on the utility of notions of various forms of capital in the explanation of volunteering. These approaches have a tendency to treat volunteering as a unified and distinct object of study, but recent sociological work has argued that seeing volunteering as an instance of work – albeit work that happens to be unpaid – and argued that this is a more productive approach than analysing volunteering in terms of motivations or the psychological properties of volunteers such as character or a disposition towards altruism. Finally, there is a discussion of the politicisation of the analysis of volunteering – which sorts of activity are prioritised and which not.